Blood Moon
by That Girl55
Summary: It is easier to chew on the past than to consume it. oneshot.


**I had always assumed Marko to be the last turned. In this story, he was turned in 1977 and was seventeen at the time. During the events of this story, which takes place in 1987, he would be twenty seven in human years, if he had not been turned.**

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It was his friends who saw her first.

With her long blonde hair flowing out behind her as she walked along the coastline, she was hard to ignore. She was older than most of their victims, bordering on thirty, but she was still beautiful. The cigarettes and tanning hadn't caught up to her yet, and her morning runs were keeping her thin.

Paul smirked at his friends, jogging over to start a conversation with the unsuspecting woman. She laughed him off, continuing her walk.

"Don't you want to talk?" He raised an eyebrow.

"I have two kids," She warned him, though playfully. "I just want some peace and quiet."

Paul looked back to the boys-they'd never taken a woman with kids before. She was hot, yes, and she was alone, but to take away a child's mother? They were monsters, but they didn't think they were capable of that type of horror.

In the end, David shook his head. No, they would find someone else tonight.

"I'll let you walk alone, then. Goodnight." Paul trotted away from her, and they headed back to the boardwalk.

Marko stopped, though. He noticed something.

The curve of her bottom as she walked away, the familiarness of her voice. In his past life, he knew this girl. Not well, he was sure, but enough that he would know her name, that she would know his, if he just saw her face.

Max had warned Marko and his brothers against talking to people from their past-although for most of the boys, some of whom had been vampires for nearly a hundred years now, it wasn't a problem. He wished things were the same for him.

He turned back towards his brothers, already reaching the boardwalk, and stood frozen on the shoreline. He should go with them, he realized, as if he was on autopilot. But it was too late now, the girl had seen his face, and she was racing towards him.

"Marko?" She asked, panting. She stopped just short of him, nearly running him down. "Marko Donald?"

He swallowed, hard, wondering if he had to kill her now. He could already sense his brothers walking back over, guessing that he had wandered into trouble.

Marko wanted to shake his head, to act like he didn't know who that was, but instead he found himself lost in her eyes.

"Cheri Baker? God, I never thought I'd see you after that trip."

He found himself thinking back to the summer of 1977, the summer he was turned. He'd traveled down to Santa Carla from Oregon with his girlfriend Susan and her best friend, Cheri. Cheri's little sister Taylor came along, because there was something wrong with her family and her parents were never around. At thirteen, Taylor was too young to stay in the house by herself. They'd taken the trip in Cheri's ancient Wagoneer that she'd brought with waitressing tips.

Marko remembered he didn't like her-didn't like her wildness and her strange rituals. Every time she stopped for gas, she made Taylor or Susie pump so she could get a pack of Virginia Slims, whether she needed a new one or not. When they got the motel room, just off the beach, she and her sister brought their dreamcatchers from home, just in case.

Before his transformation, Marko had been a cookie cutter kid, every parent's wet dream. He was smart and funny, he had a perfect GPA and had gotten a near-perfect SAT score. He was spending the summer before college at the beach with the mayor's daughter, for christ's sakes-too bad she'd brought her white trash friend.

But, seeing Cheri in this light, he was sure she turned out better than Susie did.

"It's Cheri Michaels now, anyways. I got married a couple months after we got back to Oregon."

"I don't remember you being engaged?"

"I wasn't," She blushed. "Jimmy got me pregnant. There was no engagement and no party, just a wedding."

"So you've got kids?" He asked, eager to keep the conversation away from himself. He pulled out a cigarette, as did she.

"Yeah, a seven year old and a three year old. I miscarried that first one, it took a while for me to get pregnant after that. Taylor's got it worse off than me, you know. The poor thing is twenty-three and has already lost three babies. I keep telling her it's not her fault, it's her husbands, but she blames herself."

"Why'd you lose your baby?" He asked her, wanting to hit himself after the question was out.

Marko didn't want to get involved, he needed to remember that, but he was so curious about life in Oregon, about her and Susie and Taylor and what happened after he left that night. For a moment, he turned to look for his brothers, waiting for them to appear and back him up. For the moment, they had disappeared.

Cheri spun around to face him.

"The same reason why you stormed out of the hotel room that night."

Marko audibly groaned-it was going to be brought up eventually, he knew, but he wished it hadn't.

They'd asked Susie to go pick up dinner that night, and she'd gone on her own. They didn't think anything would happen-the pizza place wasn't more than three streets down. But a half hour passed, and then another one, and Marko went looking.

He found Susie behind the parlor with a group of boys, he knew them to be surf nazis, now, popping acid tablets and pills. The pizza was on the ground, already half eaten by the nazis, and Susie was pulling off her panties, kissing the boys necks, their lips, their ears. Marko was seeing red-he'd had enough.

He grabbed her by the arm and, despite her yells and complaints, dragged her back to the hotel room. The surf nazis did nothing to help her-tourists, to them, were fair game. Besides, it looked like they'd already gotten what they wanted.

Taylor and Cheri were both asleep when they got back to the motel, and Marko locked himself in the bathroom with her, forcing his finger down her throat until she threw up the pills. When she came to, Marko asked what she was doing, why she was with those boys.

She laughed in his face, still on a small high, and rolled her head back.

"All they did was give me something you wouldn't."

She stuck out her tongue and he knew she wasn't talking about the pills.

Marko did what he'd seen his father do to his mother, what he'd seen his sister's boyfriend do to her-he reached his hand across and delivered a swift slap to Susie's face.

When his father hit his mother, she no longer cried. She found a seat at the table until her world stopped spinning, and then she apologized.

When Todd hit Veronica, she bit her lip and pouted until he looked sorry, though he never said it, and she would apologize. When she was no longer afraid, she would come over and hug him, kiss him, and the war would be over.

Susie did neither one.

Susie sat down on the edge of the tub and sobbed, both hands clutching her face, until Cheri woke up.

"Hey," She banged on the door. "Taylor and I are trying to sleep. What's going on? Is everything ok-"

Marko swung the door open, narrowly missing Cheri as he did so, and stormed out of the hotel room into the night.

He never came back. At the end of the week, Susie and Cheri and Taylor went home by themselves.

"I wanted to apologize," He said quietly. "I didn't mean to hit her so hard. I didn't think she would get upset."

"I'm not mad at you, Marko." Cheri shook her head, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. "Don't get me wrong, I was furious for a long, long time. But the years went on and Susie got more and more involved in the drugs and the boys-it didn't take long for her to confess to what she'd been doing that night, to what set you off."

"How is she?" Marko asked, biting his lip. By asking, he was opening a can of worms he wouldn't be able to close.

"Like I said," Cheri shrugged. "She got involved in some really bad stuff, LSD and speed and that. She dropped out after the first year of college and was just partying nonstop. When we were nineteen her dad resigned and her family just picked up and left, I haven't heard from her since. I'm hoping she's in rehab, you know? That she got her life back together."

Marko hoped so, too.

"What about you?" Cheri added. "I mean, I knew you were upset, but I never pegged you for the running away type. I kind of figured you were at UCLA the whole time, avoiding coming home for weekends and holidays out of fear that you'd run into one of us."

"I never went to school. It just made more sense to stay here," He said honestly. "I liked it here, and I knew my way around. I made friends that night, and besides, it was the last place you'd look for me."

"You're right about that." She smiled. "I didn't want to come back here, you know. This place gives me the creeps-did you know they call it the murder capital of the world now? God, that wasn't there ten years ago. But Jimmy, he took family vacations here as a kid, go figure, and he wanted to take Melanie and Robert."

She extinguished her cigarette, looking out towards the ocean. After a moment, she checked her watch.

"It's getting late, I've got to help him get the kids to bed. It was nice talking to you, Marko." She waved, starting to walk off, before turning back to him. "I think I get it, the running away thing, you know? Sometimes, it's easier just to leave. I wish I could."

He wanted to tell her it was still an option, it was always an option, but instead he called to her.

"Hey, Cheri! Just try not to go out after dark, okay? Especially alone." She gave him a funny look, and he tried to appear nonchalant. "It's not the murder capital of the world for nothing, you know?"

She smiled, waving as she walked back to the boardwalk, purple flip flops in her hand. Marko watched her go before returning to the cave.

The boys were already there, full and content after finding another meal for the night.

"Hey, Marko, did you eat that lady?" Paul said, clapping him on the back. "You've got guts to go after a mom."

Marko shook his head yes-sometimes, lying was easier than telling the truth. But the more he thought about her strong thighs and her thin, shaky hands, her stomach, still flat despite two kids, the more he wished he had.

She would've tasted good when he drank her, she would've tasted like Virginia Slims and a used Jeep Wagoneer, like salt water and Malibu Rum. She would've tasted like the past, and that was easier to chew than it was to consume.


End file.
